


Spring to Summer

by coltuonome



Category: American Revolution RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: Discussion of Death, Hamliza, Historical Lams, Lams - Freeform, M/M, Mentions of Sex, The Revolutionary War, Valley Forge, alex reacts to johns death, it’s sad, just decided to finish it up, why is everything i write sad, wrote 90 percent of this 3 years ago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:40:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25835878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coltuonome/pseuds/coltuonome
Summary: Alexander Hamilton, already knee-deep in the life he’s built for himself following the war, receives news of the death of one of his closest friends and confidantes, Lt. Col. John Laurens. As he tries to make peace with his grief, he looks back on his memories with Laurens and tries to understand the workings of his own heart.
Relationships: Alexander Hamilton/John Laurens
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	Spring to Summer

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this fic in March of 2017, just after my fourteenth birthday. I put it down when I started high school and lost time for writing, and although I thought about continuing it often, I lost all motivation to finish “Spring to Summer” when I lost my house in a wildfire that October, as well as losing motivation to do pretty much anything else. It’s been a long time since then; I’m about to start my senior year of high school and I’m applying to colleges all over the country. I never thought I would ever finish this fic, but it grew with me, and I hope its ending (and the style change accompanying it) reflects my growth as a writer and as someone with the capability to grieve the things I’ve lost. Thanks for reading. <3
> 
> Also!! This fic was most definitely inspired by @CiceroProFacto ‘s amazing work, “Song of Alexander.” (I’m on mobile so italicizing things is not easy :’) ) So, please give their fic the love it deserves after reading this, because it’s been hugely influential in both my life and my writing.

_In August, when the cicadas shrieked their woes from the treetops and the late afternoon sunlight drenched everything in honey and the vague sound of seamen’s voices could be heard from beyond the hills, the island could be seen as a paradise. When the wind whistled through the trees they sighed and swayed, and when it rained, bony thimblefuls of rain raced one another down the rippled, flowing glass of houses’ windows. The earth was rich and fertile and the saccharine smell of sugar covered everything with a drowsy, lazy air._

_There over yonder were the rich men whose plantations grew only that which could be grown quick and sold for profit -- as they only grew tobacco or cane or indigo they had no food themselves to live off of, so they imported whatever was cheapest from the other colonies. The barbarities afforded to their slaves were widespread knowledge, which is something they didn't tell you when you first moved to the island._

_The language spoken there was, surprisingly, English, and children who had grown up speaking Danish ran to the English merchants along the dehydrated wooden docks begging for lessons. Many others begged for food--even the rotten remains of the sailors’ rations thus far. The sailors tossed them scraps, both of language and of hardtack, while they loaded their ships with molasses and rum and sugar before setting off to the mainland._

_Many of the West Indies were British colonies, of course, aside from, mainly, this one, but were separate from the rest. To the north there were the American colonies, where stories of unrest and civil disarray ran rampant, and to the far east the British occupation of Bengal, where the great battle had been fought two years after my birth. But the Indies stood apart because there were all the chances in the world to succeed there and all the chances in the world to fail spectacularly. With those fast-growing and fast-selling crops one could become rich beyond their wildest dreams, or starve--and there was barely any of the population who fell betwixt._

_One startling example of those who did were the crones along King Street._

_The old hags who lined the streets of the isle proclaimed to know everything of love. For six rijksdaalder and the opportunity to alter one’s body they could, with all the certainty of the world, announce who one might marry or at least love in the future. They made a show of it, at times even gathering in the plaza where children clawed at white seafaring birds in the sky to perform to the masses. Maidens clad in thick, heavy dresses would come on their free time to listen and watch, indigo fans bleeding into the pale blue of the sky as they tried to keep the oppressive heat away._

_The hags were women who'd never learned to read or write, but could scan you at a glance and say they knew your future. They did not use scrying orbs or flames to make this known. Those tactics, they said, were reserved for those tricky vixens across the ocean. It wasn't clear if any of them had ever been in a boat. They were going extinct, as it were; nearly everyone on the island of some merit had had their fortunes told and known, and money was scarce. The only folk who hadn't been analyzed were children, but even they became targets. At Ned Stevens’ urging, I attended them once; those women along the main street._

_Six rijksdaalder were hard to come by; I stole four from Mister Stevens while he was out. The other two came from his son, who wanted nothing more than to know who I was to love. Along the cobblestones we went, turning our heads towards the sea, so our hair might blow away from our faces and away from our mouths. The coins in my pocket felt heavy--lead bullets in the heart of my breeches. And there they were, then, the women crowding the side of the road, some to sell their bodies, others to sell their wares. It was the latter Stevens and I sought on this damp, heated day in August._

_We neared them. They groped our fronts and held on to whatever fabric they could find, tearing our already scrappy clothes further. “Cressida,” we cried. “We want none other than Cressida.” For Cressida, so town gossip had reported, was one of two women along the island whose fortunes would be true. The other had died of cholera two years before this. So to Cressida we wanted to go, and to her we were brought. Cressida could not look older or more careworn had she been paid to do so. And, in all realities, she was. Thick gray hair fell down her spotted back in matted clumps, like the clouds over a rough ocean. Her eyes had more wrinkles surrounding them than a piece of parchment hung up in the wind. Her lips were the color of ripened coconuts, her skin the tone of the dirt beneath the trees. She reminded me of a well-worn copy of the bible, cover cracking, stories still legible but water-stained with the effects of time. She herself was the effect of living her whole life on the sea. Perhaps sixty years ago she had been the young bride of a fisherman who remained no more, but still after him she pined. In town she was known as a crook. She was a laughingstock, a fool, yet people paid her to tell them about love, and none of the bad things about her stilled Ned Stevens from pulling me into her lean-to by the hand._

_Cressida’s eyes, watery from years of reading skin and not one single word, ran over me, inspecting every inch. I had half the mind to ask her if she knew who I was. She didn't seem to recognize me after almost a minute, until her eyes jolted open and she tilted her head up. “You're Rachel’s boy, aren't you?” Cressida’s voice was at once the smooth glassiness of water and the choppy waves of the ocean. Her hand surged up, flame on a sheet of paper, and seized me by the wrist._

_Fear shook me through and through. “Yes, ma'am,” I choked out._

_She smiled a toothless grin at me. “But,” she started, “young Alexander, you are only seventeen years of age. Why are you here?” Her nails bit into me._

_“To… To ask you, ma'am, about…”_

_“About his love, of course,” Stevens said, impatient. When I turned to look at him, he stood a pace behind me, arms crossed, silhouetted dimly against the warm light of the outside. I heard his shoe tapping against the dirt floor. His hair had around it the illumination of imagined sunshine, and I could not see his face, for it was obscured by the prescient darkness around us._

_The hag smiled again. “Have you your money?” I yanked my hand out of hers to retrieve it. She continued: “Usually I would forbid a youngling such as yourself to ask this of me, but as I knew your mother personally I can attest to your well-being.” I found the coins and dutifully dropped them in her outstretched palm. “Well, now,” she murmured softly. “Where did you come across all this money?” My face grew warm. “I don't believe the profitable Mr. Stevens would give this amount to you.”_

_I tried to stammer out a response. If Mister Stevens heard word that I stole from him, I would be punished severely. “I, er… I pick--”_

_“I gave them to him,” Stevens interjected again. “Now, I shall ask of you to continue this as quickly as you might. We've work to do.”_

_“Yes,” Cressida said. It came out as a sort of breathy moan. “Work.” She seized me again, and I yelped. “Where do you think you should be marked, boy?” I looked at her, confused, and terrified. I didn't want to be branded, like the few cattle I had seen herded off of trading ships to be harvested for meat. She gestured to a bowl beside her. “For the old gods,” she said, and gave me a toothless grin. “So they know who to assign you to. The chest works the best, in my humble opinion.” She leant back, slapping a hand that looked more like tree roots than flesh and bone against her atrophied thigh. “Closest to the heart, you know.” Outside the lean-to, the wind sifted steadily through the trees. There would be a storm as early as tomorrow, I predicted._

_I turned to look at Stevens and saw a look of general impatience. It was too late to back out now. I made Cressida release me, and unbuttoned my vest, and then my undershirt. “I've heard stories that some old civilizations thought the heart was the brain.” She dipped her fingertips in the bowl of indigo wax to her side on a table. Beneath it was a flame, weak and fragile, that heated the wax enough so it was a liquid substance. “They thought it held all of life’s secrets--and love.” I noted that the indigo had not fully combined with the wax, the two being made of different particles, creating a bluish-gray heterogeneous mixture that pooled around the edges and spilled over into itself in the center. “So in embalming their dead they'd remove the brain and throw it out, for to them it was nothing but a spacer twixt one ear the other.” It always fascinated me to see the red liquid flowing in beaded teardrops like blood down candlesticks, but I had never seen indigo in wax before. And for good reasons--it did not combine. “So to honor the gods we think of the heart as love and the brain as useless to emotion. Cold, logical, intelligent,” she finished. Everything I wanted to be._

_This was stupid. I was only here to appease Stevens, not to learn my love. That, I thought, was reserved for me and me only._

_To Cressida I exposed my bare chest, and she looked upon me with less interest than if I were no more than a rock upon a pebble beach. She brought her palms up to skim my torso, and I shivered in spite of myself, in spite of the heat, in spite of my nonchalance._

_With shaking hands and closed eyes, Cressida painted with one finger a design that most certainly was random, as though her finger had spasmed uncontrollably for ten seconds. It was warm but not hot, and mildly uncomfortable, but I could see the cracks spreading in the design as the wax cooled. Cressida’s hand was still outstretched, trembling slightly, before she pulled it back sharply to look at the design._

_It was unclear then what exactly she had painted, for layers of color had overturned layers of gray, but when the mixture had cooled Cressida picked the wax scabs from my flesh._

_The indigo had certainly left its mark, for there, between my ribs on the lower right side of my torso, lay the image of a flame, smoking and spiraling upwards in a helix, blue and terrible, and slightly brown in the dingy light of the structure._

_“Hmm,” Cressida said. “So you will burn.”_

_“Burn?” I asked dumbly._

_“Well, boy, let's think. Let's say you're a source of fuel. A drop of oil. Now, tell me, boy: What do you do to oil that makes it useful?”_

_I swallowed thickly, balling my hands into fists. “You burn it.”_

_Cressida cackled, leaning impossibly back in her sedan chair, and smacked her hands against her thighs. “That's right, boy, you burn it! Good. Very good! Now tell me. What do you think you need someone to do to you? To make you useful? Just--just based on our discussion here?”_

_My voice was strained and tense and came out as a whisper. “Burn me. Like parchment.”_

_Her cackles grew louder. “Yes,” she crowed between laughs, “yes, yes, yes! Imagine that: Rachel’s boy being burned by his lover. You are no different than your mother, boy.”_

_I shook, hatred and rage running my veins cold. I trembled and trembled and tried to find a way to release the pressure without exploding._

_“I don't have an answer for who you'll love, Alexander,” she said, softer now, as if apologizing for her outburst. “But I do know you will find them, whoever they are, and you will love them.” She leaned in, dark eyes wide. “But be careful, because fire catches.” Her hand danced over the pitiful flame beneath the wax bowl. “And if it catches on you, you will burn and burn and burn until even your ashes are charred and gone.”_

He's gone. 

The letter falls from my hand and drifts ever so slowly to the floor. It rocks to and fro on the open air, braving the storm in a skiff made of paper, until it finds a residence on the ground. Laurens. My Laurens is gone and there is only one thought racing through my mind: Poor Henry. But before I can think about pitying Laurens's father I'm keeling over the desk, chest heaving, eyes blurring, hands shaking. In my mind Laurens's body is one of many on the battlefield, chest caved in by the fleeing soldiers’ feet, blood flowing from the corner of his mouth, warming and turning grey in the South Carolinian afternoon sun, just one more body amongst hundreds-- too many to have been felled like timber in a forest for a worthless cause. He's dead. 

A vicious sob tears itself from my throat, low and guttural, and I clap my hand over my mouth to soothe the jolting, stuttering gasp that follows it. I should not be as affected by his death as I am. He would not want me to. He would not will this pain on anyone, that I am sure, over something, he would say, as trivial as his death. As though his death were nothing more than an unfortunate happening and not what it is. What is it? Or, I suppose, what should it be?

It should be a solemn affair: a few words of grief, of disappointment, a funeral, a burial. Then the thought occurs to me: what if his body won't be recovered? What if he will sit there rotting for eternity? My Laurens, reduced to worm-fodder. Reduced to a literal skeleton of what he used to be. 

I'm viewing all of this through a sort of haze; through a sort of cognitive dissonance. I laugh to myself, at the absurdity that I could believe all this is real, because it isn't. I know it isn't. I know that at any moment a courier will come and crest the hill with another letter that disproves the first. I turn my head to the right to stare out of the window, waiting for that horse to turn up. I stare and stare and come up empty and there is nothing I would not do for that void to be filled. 

My God. 

I burned farms once, and was delayed, and found out that while I was gone the General's staff, Laurens included, had presumed me dead; drowned in the Schuylkill. And how they reacted when they were wrong! Another laugh bubbles out of me. Lafayette had wept and Washington had clapped me on the back but John. John had stood there as though nothing could prove to him that I was still alive. He could not believe that I was there. He'd already resigned himself to living without me. Is that what I'll become now, once I accept that he's gone (which I can't, not now): empty and disbelieving when Laurens reveals himself to be alive? Will he? Can I believe for that long? And then: why would I want to believe if I am almost certain I would be wrong? 

My hands come up from where they’re balled at my sides and grip the edge of my desk for support. My chest heaves and I feel as though I’m going to be sick. Laurens, I think, my Laurens is dead. Again and again this repeats: Laurens, Laurens is dead. Laurens, Laurens is dead. 

My chest is folding in on itself. I can't breathe; I can't even think about trying to. It hurts too much. As if there were a barrel on my torso, I breathe quickly and loudly and all together, like the way New Englanders talk. I'm suffocating. If Laurens was a wading pool, I widened him to an ocean and let myself drown. Now the water is gone and where it was is just air and I'm falling. 

Will I miss him?

This only feels like regret to me. 

He's gone; body already taken home, or if not, has already decomposed into the earth. Why did I not act sooner? 

What will I miss about John Laurens? 

I've regained control of my breathing again, and the ability to process cognizant thought. His eyes-- I will miss them staring at me early in the morning, our bare chests pressed against each other. His hands, perhaps-- wrapped around a lobsterback’s throat, or around a sword handle, or around my torso, thumbs dragging along my skin. His mind is what I'll miss most of all.

But then how selfish would I be if I determined one’s personal worth by what I'll miss of them when they are gone?

I would be resigned to be presumed selfish by posterity, just this once, if only to think of John Laurens. 

_The remnants of buttermilk in the bottom of my tin cup shone in the dim light of the fire as I moved it to and fro. A knot on the wood I was sitting on dug into my rear no matter which way I shifted to avoid it. Harrison, across from Tilghman and next to me, gestured wildly with his hands to illustrate a point he'd been making. I heard him speak of his raucous college days in Philadelphia or memories of first cracking open the law volumes on his father's shelf, but my mind was somewhere else entirely. In my mind, wind ripped through the trees and tore the muslin off shiplap and sent the masts of ships flying. My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands._

_Laurens touched my shoulder, and somewhere off to the right I could hear him speak. “Hamilton, are you alright?”_

_I moved my head to acknowledge him. “Yes, Laurens. Just tired, is all that’s the matter.”_

_He stayed silent for a second before gesturing to my cup. “Did the Colonel tell you where he got this?”_

_I didn't want to say anything; the answer should have been obvious. Then, however, I thought it might be possible that he saw the beads of sweat on my brow, the tremor of my hands, or that he heard my heartbeat, and I had never been so grateful. “It was from yesterday's afternoon raid on Loyalist farmhouses, I think. But Dulles didn't tell me exactly.”_

_For once his hair, usually pomaded and powdered, was washed and lay dry and bare over his ears and down his back. His head seemed to glow from the light behind him of the fire. His skin was pale, but warm in the firelight, and he was relaxed against the log we had brought out of the woods for this purpose. I had never seen him like this-- this intimately. Every muscle in his body was cool and collected, and… mildly concerned on my behalf._

_I looked down into my cup and tilted it again. The dregs of milk slipped from the top to the bottom. Buttermilk was a good find, especially in such large portions as we did._

_The conversations around the fire slowly dwindled out, just as the fire did, and when the General even bothered to come outside his tent to tell us all to sleep, we did not resist. Meade let the fire burn down to only coals, flailing his coat over it til the flames dissipated, and we filed into our respective tents._

_The night penetrated every corner of the tent, even when we set our candles down in the darkness. There was no escape from its vile clutches. It rose from my throat; a searing reminder of everything I was capable of. I'd had a problem with Laurens… With myself, if I was to be truthful, tonight. Like a starving pussycat I pounced and preyed on it._

_“What we did tonight was unwise,” I said._

_Laurens, already shedding his coat in preparation for bed, turned to look sharply at me. “What are you talking about?”_

_“With the rations.” Laurens visibly relaxed. I watched his fingers fly over the buttons of his waistcoat. “I'm surprised Washington let us take matters so far, considering his experience with the disaster in Trenton.”_

_“I seem to remember we won that battle, despite the fact that I was not there to lead us to victory,” Laurens said with a wry smile. “And, Alexander, let the men celebrate the army’s success if they wish.”_

_“We've been doing nothing but running, John,” I said coldly. “And celebrating retreat is hardly the best reason for wasting rations.”_

_“Hamilton.” I turned. He was startlingly close. My breath dissolved into the dry leaves of December. His eyes were imploring, the color of the sea in a summer monsoon, his hand against my shirtsleeve. “How long has it been since you've slept?”_

_I could not be taken advantage of again. I yanked my hand from his grasp and turned away. “Long enough.” I tugged back the covers of my pallet and blew out my candle as I clambered in. He did the same to his side of the tent. I heard him breathe loudly as he tried to find a reply._

_“We celebrate what we can, Alexander. Don't mistake desperation for naivety.”_

_Earlier that day we had taken our horses along a ridge, chatting amiably amongst ourselves, pretending we weren't put off by the height we would have to tumble down should we fall. He had slipped when telling a joke--something Gilbert had said--and referenced to me as “Al.” The cliffside we occupied fell silent, as though the world were marveling at his miracle._

_I had snorted like one of the horses, my head dropping to my chest as I struggled to keep my laughter in. His came out nervously, a babbling brook that ran down the cliff side, as though he was worried he had offended me. I pulled on the reins to jar my mount to a halt, and watched the upset of pebbles scramble down the hill. “Christ, Laurens, you don't make it easy, do you?” He had nothing to respond to this but a laugh, and so we continued, and the sun set slowly behind us, turning the heavy clouds in the sapphire sky to coral._

_I turned on my back to look at him, just barely a meter away. “Maybe,” I said sharply, words I hadn't thought about flooding the back of my throat, “you should take that lesson and learn from it yourself.” And suddenly this was not about the army anymore but about he and I. I had not, in all truth, expected nor wanted this outcome, and prepared myself for a justified verbal lashing._

_But he did not reply, and I thought he might be asleep, until the moon shone through the crack between the tent flaps and illuminated the whites of his eyes._

I should write something.

A memorial, a eulogy, maybe. Just thinking about it makes my stomach heave. This is too final; there's too much closure in what I want to do. Again the springing sensation comes of pity for Henry Laurens. While he was alive-- Good God-- Laurens often spoke of his father, with what could be called reverence, if he hadn’t spoke with such a bitterness of his tone. Perhaps he admired him, in the recesses of his mind, but there was no love between he and his father. For his father, he’d said, in one of the rare moments when I could pick the flax seeds of his personal history from the cotton of his mind, dealt in people. 

I stare out the window some more.

I don't realize I'm weeping till the first jagged breath comes. 

_The courier threw the sack of letters in front of my feet. He saluted roughly, fingers shaking in the cold, and turned to go. As he climbed up onto his horse I could see the fog like tobacco smoke emanating from his mouth._

_The letters could freeze should they stay there in the snow, but I still did not bear to move. I myself was frozen, shivering on the front porch of the Potts house, watching the soldiers in the field attempt drills to keep warm. Even in February the chill was enough to rattle one deep to the bones. But January, colleagues asserted, was much worse. I could not afford to complain. I plucked the letters from the frozen ground, would to God they were not frozen through._

_Papers were jammed under the front door, some annotated, most not. The window was in a perpetual state of condensation and freezing, building a thin layer of ice over it. It hurt when I bent down to remove the crumples from the doorjamb; I stood up and coughed, pushing the door open. “Letters,” I said coarsely. Laurens's and Washington’s voices came from the office, hushed in tones seldom used except for battle strategy. But we'd not be fighting until the end of the winter._

_“You went out in this cold, Ham?” Meade asked as he came slowly down the stairs. The murmuring in the office stopped, and Martha Washington emerged, trailed by the general, and finally Laurens, who took the sack of letters from me, fingers lingering a second too long._

_“Alexander,” he said sharply, turning away to pour the post out onto the table where we had taken our breakfast this morning. “You know the dangers of this chill, especially after your bout. You are to stay inside.” His hands rustled over the envelopes. Mrs. Washington smiled at me before beginning to head upstairs. It was always a joy having her around, no less this time, when the army desperately needed some kind of positive influence._

_“You are not my superior,” I retorted to John, snatching one addressed to Washington from General Clinton. “Let it be the will of Providence if I am to die before my time.” I began peeling up the wax on the parchment, ribs aching, head reeling. Like hell if I made my suffering known. “I don't need your pity, especially when there are four thousand men out there without a blanket to share amongst themselves.”_

_Laurens remained quiet, sorting through the letters from soldiers out in the field. I read my letter from Clinton, sitting down beside Laurens at the table in the front room. He looked over halfway through my reading and spied the date at the top. “January 16,” he commented. “What was the delay?”_

_“I don't know,” I replied dismissively, “but the wax wasn't broken. Slow couriers, perhaps.” As I read I could imagine my response, under Washington's pen… But I could also imagine Laurens's eyes on me, under his scrutiny, and I was distracted entirely. From the stack of clean parchment I took a few sheets and began writing, my mind somewhere else completely._

_When I had ridden back from Morristown, my horse slowly ambling so I wouldn't fall off, he was there on the steps of the Potts house, head bobbing to and fro Cicero’s Orations to Homer’s Iliad. His pen had run a million miles an hour, looking for possible references from one to the other, said he afterward, though I suspect he was just passing the time, as the two were written hundreds of years apart. I'd said, “You'll cramp your neck leaning over like that, Laurens,” and he'd looked up, eyes wide, and had forgotten the books on his lap as he jolted up to meet me. He'd helped me from my horse slowly but impatiently, and then embraced me and did not let go until the morning came. We'd spent the night like that, in each other’s arms, huddling for warmth, just listening to our breathing. (I'd thought…. he'd said. And I'd replied, I know.) But here we were, writing letters, with so much friction between us. That night we had slipped easily between each other, sleeping with our legs tangled, and he was gone in the morning, out with the boys… but he had left behind an extra blanket that still smelled of him._

_“Here,” I said, thrusting the copy of my letter thus far at him. “I'm not sure about this sentence.”_

_John craned his neck. “‘...much surpasses any that we have yet experienced,’” he read aloud. “Change ‘much’ to ‘greatly.’ It makes more sense.” I did as he said, and tilted the letter so he could read it again. After worrying his lip for a spell he looked at me and said, “No, the passage doesn't fit. It's redundant. I'm sure Clinton gets enough complaining from the troops as it is, and you've already said how bad we have it.” My pen scribbled fanatically over the words, trying not to appear bothered. The hypocrisy of it all!_

_“Wait,” he said, shifting in his seat. “Didn't you write to Clinton just a few days ago?”_

_Wordlessly I gestured to the address on Clinton’s letter. I was not writing as myself._

_“Oh.”_

_We sat in silence as we wrote. It took time to finish, but I did, and signed my name at the bottom. I'd copy it later, before I went to bed, but I couldn't torture myself by spending time with him. I still had no idea where we stood. If he wasn't going to talk to me, or even hash it out, like soldiers, neither was I. I could make him think, though. And I would._

_I pushed the papers away from me, leaning back in my seat, and stood up. The chair scraped across the ceramic floor in the most unpleasant way possible. As I moved to leave, I took his hand in mine and pressed my lips to his knuckles. His eyes widened, and I turned and left._

_I heard his chair scraping to follow me, and I cursed inwardly. “Hamilton,” he said. He joined me outside to overlook the army. He didn't say anything after that._

_The men in the field finished their drills, and tension crept back into the air as they realized they had nothing to do to keep warm. Some spread out clothes on the grass and lay in the sun, content for now, the horrors of January past._

_He'd grabbed a flask from within the galley. I remember nights spent with him drunk out of our minds, rocking against one another on our way out the tavern. He'd confessed to something that I can't remember. I can remember I'd wept. Perhaps he wants to feel the same way he did then: raw and exposed and cleansed._

_We slid down in the doorway across from each other. He passed the flask to me, and I took a tiny sip of the whiskey inside before passing it back to him. From here, one side warm from inside and the other cool to the touch from the winter breeze, we could hear the cries of the sick and hungry. The night before, Washington had indulged in mutton and wine, a donation from a rather affluent southern congressman. The blood from inside the lamb dripped from the knife onto the tablecloth. I had stared at it, heart pounding--Washington splurged on fresh meat while the rest of his army went hungry._

_I was brought back to the present by the insistent touch of Laurens's hand on my thigh. “Hamilton,” he said, eyes wide, as if he was almost frightened by the severity of his thought. “What if we don't last the cold? What if the cause we've fought for goes down in history as a failed experiment?” The cold made my eyes water. What if we are paraded around in the history books as an example of why rising up against larger powers only yielded death, destruction, and mortification? What would happen were we to lose?_

_I reached my hand out to take the flask and knocked it back. The sun left a greenish-pink-white imprint on the inside of my eyelids when I opened them again. The back of my throat burned, and I felt as though I would weep._

_Laurens's icy eyes pressed into me nonetheless. “What are we going to do?” he asked in a whisper, knuckles and fingertips going white where they were pressed against the brick floor._

_It would be incredibly selfish of me to get drunk off of Laurens's three gills of liquor, but now the temptation was tugging at the buttons of my coat. If only I were drunk until we left this hell. “Survive,” I answered softly._

_There was a tap on the plaster to our left. When we looked, it was Washington, looking stoic as ever in the pale morning sun. There was a smile there, so rarely seen, just a thin curve splitting his face. “Quit your drinking. We’ll survive this winter, starvation be damned. Until then….” He retrieved from his pocket a handful of paper slips. Tickets. He handed one to the each of us, smiling again, before sighing quietly and retreating within the warm house. Reeling from shock, I turned to Laurens, mouth open a crack. It was clear his wife had had a large effect on his general attitude._

_He peered at the ticket in his palm. “Cato.”_

_“Cato?” I demanded. “How--who did he hire to make this production possible? We barely have blankets. First, he blatantly ignores the struggles of his army, and now this? I am utterly--” Laurens's hand covered my mouth softly. He gave me a smirk that did something to my heart._

_“‘But you must hide it, for I know thy temper,’” he recited gleefully._

_“It’s ‘I’, not ‘you,’” I corrected before scrabbling to get his hand away from me._

_“But, isn’t this exciting?”_

_“I want to fight,” I reminded Laurens indignantly. “I would rather not lie in cowardice watching Marcus fall blindly at Lucia’s feet.”_

_“That’s not how it happened,” he laughed. “Now, if you really want to partake in some action, you still have a letter to copy, if I remember correctly.” And, like an ass, I watched dumbly as he lifted my hand to his lips as I had his. Then he rose to resume working again._

I am not hungry, but I feel I might eat something to try and regain my strength. Biscuits are plentiful in the kitchen, and might do something to calm my stomach. Every little action is excruciating, and I feel as I lean back in my chair to get up like I’ve run a thousand miles. The small mirror across the room reflects the image of myself exactly how I feel it should. I look as though I have aged five years in five minutes.

There are glass cups in the cabinet above the stove. I lean up to get one to fill with water, feeling as though I might faint. My hands shake when I dip the glass into the bucket of well water on the floor. I bring it to my lips, my hands chilled already, and feel no relief from the ghostly pains in my chest. There were men in the army who had stepped in front of cannons just as they had fired, and lost their legs or arms, sometimes, horribly, their heads. When the surgeon had attended to their wounds and tied their arteries and they had healed so the limbs they had lost were nothing but stumps, they complained of pains where their limbs used to be. It was as though the hands or feet they had lost were there still, and still caused them pains. The Scot Porterfield had writ a first-hand account of this feeling after his leg was amputated, which I read in recovery from my sickness in 1777, that matched the soldiers’ descriptions entirely. He described a feeling of loss where something used to be--a deep ache that would only worsen over time. There’s that same deep ache all around me--it would be absurd if I have these phantom pains for Laurens, who was not a part of me. Instead, I hurt everywhere he’d been...around me.

I look down at the glass in my hand, and this is once again so ridiculous that I can hardly bear it any longer. He threatens to burst out of me like an eagle taking flight: powerful, fast, majestic, a damn nuisance, a ravenous scavenger, a beast who picks the entrails out of long-dead carrion. I down the water as fast as my throat will swallow, and then one thing leads to another and I’ve hurled the glass against the wall. My legs shake, and I stand there trembling, staring at the shards--the fragments of glass, sharp as bone--and I wonder absentmindedly what would be if I found a way to reassemble it. I would use a fire--the oven, maybe--heat it until it was blazing and melted--does the oven reach such high temperatures?--and find a way to blow it, and snap the stem off at the end. Or, should the oven not work, I would find a way to glue it back together. Holland makes perfect glue. I could have it shipped. But then: does the sum of the glass’s parts equal its whole? Surely there would be some leaks. Leaks, water trickling out like blood from a still beating heart--out of the corner of his mouth, a bullet to the chest, trampled by the rushing soldiers desperate to escape alive, blood--blood everywhere--in pools--standing blood in a pool where his chest had been caved in--weeks ago, it happened--he’ll never--we’ll never--God--

_Once, after I had watched enviously as soldiers returned wearily from a field battle, Washington released the two of us from our duties so he could converse with the generals who had fought. We found and exploited the opportunity of an open field to rest our heads. Our adversaries had fled and hopes were high, danger relatively low. So there we sat, heads resting against logs from the woods we had trotted through, our shirts and breeches slowly dampening from the moist earth. Our foreheads were tickled by the overhanging stalks of rye, but we did not mind one bit. It was nice to sit in solitude for at least a little while until we were called back to be filled in on what had happened. We had with us books, I remember--I Leviticus, he Lucretius, a soft-leaded pencil between his fingers as he turned the pages of De Rerum Natura. His father had shipped them to us from Philadelphia--he had written about the piles of bookstores he'd encountered there. A black bumblebee flitted past my ear lazily, and I shifted to move my fingers to shoo it away._

_Laurens gestured to the leather-bound book. “I wonder if he knew that he'd gotten it right,” he said, lips curving up like Eros’s bow. “The details, of course, are wrong--but the part about what are basically atoms... It's true.”_

_I slipped a spare small sheet of parchment between my pages to save my progress. “Something about the alluring nature of Venus in the first pages made me exceedingly anxious to read him,” I joked, recalling days ago when I had stolen Natura from Laurens's hands and read through the first few pages._

_Laurens smirked, flipping back to the pages of which I spoke. “...vanquished by the never-healing wound of love, throwing back his handsome neck and gazing at you,” he reads, reciting a hymn to Venus of Mars. I watched his fingers as they turned back to where he was._

_“Epicurus, after,” I commented, and he smiled and nodded._

_His finger came up to tap my nose, looking down at the page. “Death is nothing to us,” he read softly, as if afraid of waking some ancient spirit._

“Alexander?”

She finds me standing in the kitchen staring at the shattered remnants of a water glass on the floor in front of me. Her hands, softened with olive oil every morn and night, clutch at my sleeve, at the cuff, and shake slightly to bring me forth from this nightmare. The bottom half of my field of vision isn't registering; the colors are slurring together. I turn to look at her, find her lip quivering. Her hair is down along her back, tied at the nape, and I have to resist the urge to hold her--to make her his replacement. Her rose nightgown lies slim and sheer over her body. I remember the times I had turned to the women of towns we had stopped in to release my pent up frustration of Laurens. They were soft and light and dainty and made plenty of noise, but they were forgettable. My Betsey was not.

One year the fishermen on the isle brought with them a shark. They hung it up on the dock for a few hours to let the townspeople gawk at the awful sight. I was able to escape the clerk desk for five minutes to run to the carcass. It smelled something disgusting--worse even than the bodies lying in piles in Valley Forge.

No--nothing could defeat that.

But the stench was comparable to it. The sun was setting in the sky, so even then, as close as I was to it, it was still barely a silhouette. I sweat just looking at it. The mouth hung open as if twine had been passed through it and bolted to the ground, and inside was row after row of teeth. People had been abusing their power, obviously, for some were missing as souvenirs. I pinched one betwixt my fingers and yanked. Like the corpses of humans, the teeth of sharks begin to fall out relatively quickly after death, if prompted by an outside force. I held in my hand the tooth of a sea monster, a legend of sailing stories, a known killer of men. A bead of sweat dripped uncomfortably down the underside of my arm. I leaned up to brush my hand along its side. When going one way its skin was smooth, almost slippery and slimy--frog egg feel. When going the other, it was so rough it near brought my skin to a bloodied mess. When I frolicked in the surf and slammed my chest into the sand--the shark was rough like that. The tooth I stored in the heel of my slipper, and I stood back to admire the fishermen’s work as the sun sank lower and lower.

It was only when the sun dipped entirely into the ocean that I saw its eyes.

Someone had taken the shark’s eyes and replaced them with glass. That's what I had thought. Or, that God had hidden the planets behind the sun and put our solar system into the eye of a shark. If that was His intention, He succeeded. The shark was truly terrifying not only because of its teeth that would gladly tear a man to shreds, but because its eyes were truly soulless. Had its eyes been bigger, perhaps had whites around the edges, it would have appeared more human and easier to sympathize with. It looked like a demon who swam up from the depths of Hell. The flat, expressionless face, the smooth skin that would harm you when rubbed the wrong way, the rows of teeth that could cut rusted metal, and the black glass taxidermied eyes all added up to something I could not and would not trust with my life.

I suppose they added up to Eliza, too.

Her black eyes glisten in the afternoon sun, fearful and tearful, watching me staring at the broken glass.

“How did this happen? Are you alright?”

When she talks she shows teeth that are not quite crooked and not quite straight and all around quite dangerous.

“Alexander? Would you please answer me? Are you alright?”

She crosses the room to me and shakes my sleeve, but I can't cease my staring at her.

Throughout everything she had retained this similar expression. She had worn it on the night I met her. She had worn it on our wedding night. She is wearing it now: pursed lips, wide unblinking eyes, brow raised just subtly enough that had one never been introduced to her one would barely notice its existence.

I feel my eyelashes against my cheek when I blink the confusion away. When I peer at her neck there are no gills there; there isn't a sharp-tipped tail where her legs are, no grey skin.

Whatever happened to that tooth I had taken?

The hurricane took everything in the end.

My mouth moves before I can grasp it. “I slipped,” I say easily, meeting her eyes. 

“The glass,” she says.

“I'm fine.”

“What is the meaning of this, Alexander? What’s happened?”

“I slipped.”

She shakes her head, strands of golden brown honey hair catching like flame at the corners of her mouth and staying there. She retreats back into the doorway. When she speaks, her voice doesn't come in fully until the third or so word. “I'm going to take Philip out in the garden. You are welcome to join us.”

“Thank you,” I whisper, already imagining Philip’s chubby fingers round hers; Eliza attempting to coax him to stand. “I will work on clearing up this mess.”

She gives me a smile that I do not deserve, and looks down at the floor before leaving me alone. 

I wish I had called her back, mentioned how I love her so, held her tight. Be true, her father had made me promise, but the memories of John’s legs, fingers, lips were almost too much to bear. Be true. Be true.

_“A wife, Laurens? That’s what you’ve been keeping from me?”_

_He had just come into the tent to retrieve the last of his belongings before leaving for the south. His mouth hung open, eyebrows arched in confusion, eyes wide, delivering a deep curdle of satisfaction to the pit of my stomach. His fingers stilled at the canvas he had been about to unroll, and he straightened to look at me head-on._

_I raised the letter I held in my hand to show him. His mouth closed slowly, face reddening, standing impossibly straighter. “Why are you looking through my personal letters?” he demanded, crossing the floor to reach for the parchment, but I held it back, out of his reach._

_“How long?” I asked._

_“Alexander, please--” His hand closed around my wrist and he yanked._

_I held my hand to his chest and shoved him away. “How long, John? How long have you lied to me?”_

_He shook slightly, and in my blindness he took hold of the letter and held it to his face. I knew what it said. “I have written to Martha, asking about the child,” Henry Laurens had written, “and I expect you’ve done the same. I would like you once this business is concld. return to Lndn. to her.”  
The muscles in Laurens's jaw twitched as he read it. He set it down on the desk we had brought in to write on with shaking hands._

_“Answer me,” I pleaded. He didn’t look at me when he responded._

_“Three years. That’s how long we--” He cut off and I swear every muscle in my body atrophied. I nearly fell over._

_“Three years? You’ve only known me for two--how could you think this was a good idea?” And then it struck me: “Laurens, you’ve a child!”_

_His eyes fell closed, as if unwilling to face the truth. “It’s not--these things aren’t uncommon. Scandals come and scandals go.”_

_“This isn’t a scandal, Laurens--this is the both of our reputations. More importantly, this is your morality. You married this Martha--what for, if you were going to abandon her for the colonies?... For me?”_

_He did not reply after a long while, head still tilted back, eyes closed, hand quivering. Suddenly he brought his fist down and smashed the letter into the wood grain. Almost as an afterthought he cast it into the candle and watched the flame spin its web along the parchment’s edge. “I will not be visiting London,” he said._

_“ John!” My fingernails dug into the flesh of my palm._

_Finally he turned to look at me, eyes hard and unyielding. The flame traveled higher. “A child born of ruin. It was never meant to happen, it was an oversight. But she couldn’t be seen as illegitimate, and Martha couldn’t be seen as….” He broke off and looked confused._

_I felt near to tears. My voice wouldn’t come--when I spoke it was barely a whisper. “Illegitimate? You abandoned her for the colonies anyway--this child, who needs a father?”_

_He said, “It was never meant to happen.” He said, “I never meant for this to happen, either.” He said, “This was an oversight. This was a lapse in judgment.”_

_I could feel the red-hot poker of rage press into my chest, into my brain, against my eyes. He had no idea...He didn’t know. That’s what my father had said before he left, before we were thrust into a vicious cycle of poverty and safety. I was a lapse of judgment. I was never meant to happen. I reached behind me for a chair to sit on, found the bed pallet instead, and dropped further than I expected to on the sheets. “A wife,” I said dumbly. “A child.” He looked pained, as though he were being inoculated against the pox. I had run my fingers over those scars a thousand times. I'd memorized where those knife marks were on his arms and imagined the scene: shirtsleeves rolled, eyes closed, nose scrunched up toward his brow as the doctor ran his infected knife under the skin. Laurens had promised the aftereffects were better than most of the army’s. “And still you thought...this…” I gesture vaguely to the space between us. “...was acceptable to you.”_

_“A lapse in judgment,” he whispered._

_“We were never meant to happen,” I replied. “Just like you said. Just like your child. Just like your wife. Tell me: did she love you like I do?”_

_“Alexander,” he begged. My eyes slid open--had they been closed?--to see him practically weeping in front of me. The flame eating the parchment touched his finger, and he flinched and dropped the letter on the dirt to burn into ashes. “Don't let this be the note I leave you on. Please. I--” He crumpled, bringing both arms to his face and scrubbing hard. “It was a mistake. We were friends. But I couldn't leave her a disgrace in London society. Please. You have to... You have to understand why I did it.”_

_“Friends,” I spat. “That's what we are, isn't it?”_

_“Of course we're friends, Alexander. That's… yes, that's what we are.”_

_“But nothing more, of course. If you can't be anything more than friends to your own wife, then where do I fall in? On what point do I lie?”_

_His shoulders dropped in defeat. “For Christ’s sake, Alexander, I can’t very well marry you, what do you want? What do you want me to admit? What more must I confide in you? I don’t understand what you want from me--just tell me!” I focused on the way his head tilted in disbelief, eyes wide and glistening in the warm candlelight, and curled my legs beneath my arms, resting my chin on my knees. My eyes stung and burned as though the tent were aflame, acrid smoke pouring and attacking my face. It had smelled like this then, that night almost three years before now. The fire had sprung from housetop to housetop devouring everything in its sight. Fear had struck me then--the fear that, like the Meleager of old, my life was contained if it did not burn. Oh, Althaea, I pleaded, spare me. Spare me. There is so much left…_

_“...I don’t know,” I said. “I’m… I apologize. I should have seen… I should have known.”_

_“No,” Laurens said. “This was my mistake. I should have told you when…” His voice drifted off, and we both knew to what he was referring. The first time we fell into bed together, chests heaving, voices breaking, hands scrabbling for any purchase on the smooth Dover-like cliffs of the other’s skin. He had wept afterward, had sat up when he presumed me to be sleeping and wept quietly. But, I could not sleep either, and listened to the torture of Laurens's hushed sobs that twisted my lungs into knots worthy of the ocean. It all made sense now: he had betrayed his wife, and betrayed...something else. The probability was high that it was the Bible. “I’m sorry.”_

_He was in front of me before I realized, kneeling down and opening his arms. I did not react, instead pressed myself further into my knees. He sighed, eyes still shinier than usual, and slid his arms aside my chest, forcing me to let my legs down to allow him easier access. We stayed there in that awkward position until I leaned back and let him lie atop me, swinging my legs upward so I lay parallel to him. He peppered the underside of my neck with soft kisses that I wished I had it in me to resist. Finally his lips hit my own--gently, slowly, we went. “I’m sorry,” he whispered for every time he kissed me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry….”_

_I put my hand to his back to cease this rabble. “Laurens,” I said, “I forgave you the second you stepped in the room.”_

_“Why?” I watched the muscles in his neck tense and unravel as he raised his head to look at me._

_I connected the stars on his face into constellations before I dropped my head to answer him. “Well, as you said, I can’t marry you, so what more do you want?”_

_His mouth fell open not even a centimeter in the way I so thoroughly enjoyed. Then it curled upwards into a smile, a laugh at the back of his throat, eyelashes hitting his cheek. He was not an iota fazed that I had just admitted myself to him--that this was more than just a base, amoral attraction. His fingers idly fiddled with the ends of the knot of my cravat, and I wished desperately he’d get on with it and untie it fully. Then, like flame overtaking parchment letters, we’d see where it took us in the end._

_But his fingers ceased, and he looked down at me from beneath hooded eyelids. “Help me with the rest of my things, and we can go to the river?”_

I will need something tacky, but not overly so. There are wet glass shards spanning the kitchen as big as a coin to as small as a splinter on a roughly-hewn log. A wet rag, I soon find, only pushes the shards around and does a lousy job of collecting them. I don't dare to use anything stickier than water, for there would be a much greater mess in the end. So I settle for the loaf of bread lying on the dining table, still warm from the bakery upstream, and slowly cut a thin slice. When applied to the shards it picks them up nicely, and it's only a few seconds before I'm through and I can toss the bread into the bucket of scraps. 

Had he known? Before he fought, had he known that the war had been concluded? Had he fought knowing that it was useless?

And then: had he received my letter?

Maybe he had, maybe he hadn't, and the weight of that thought, instead of ripping through me like a dagger the way the news of his death had, swells and settles on my shoulders, a dead, limp, heavy weight. We had fallen out of contact, fallen out touch with each other. I could not remember that I knew him as well as I once had. When I wrote that letter, I was imagining his forehead pressing against mine, a smile playing on his lips, fingers combing my hair back from my forehead. When I wrote that letter I imagined horses along ridges and cliff faces, imagined jokes and laughter, imagined the last film of buttermilk in the bottom of a tin cup, glistening in the firelight where Laurens sat, leather boots taunting the flames, a golden halo just around his ears. I imagined we'd speak again. I imagined I'd hear his voice again. Now all I imagine are the words I wrote swimming round my head, tropical fishes in a tropical storm.

Yrs. For ever, I had written. I am yours for as long as you will let me be. He had said that once, deep in the recesses of sleep, his bare chest against mine, eyelashes damp against my cheek. His golden hair had been more grey than gold in the moonlight that shone through the window. He had been golden before, though--just minutes before. In the heaviness of my mind during the whole process I saw him as pure gold, worth everything the gods could pay. He was Galatea, come to life beneath my hands, and I was Pygmalion, overwhelmed and wondrous. In the drowsiness afterward, he had whispered, “I am yours as long as you will let me be.” And I, confused, unprepared Pygmalion, had no reply to offer him. It was just there at the back of my throat--what I wanted to say, and how--but in escaping my lips it was strangled, and fell flat to the floor. I had not said anything.

I wish I could have said, I love you. I wish I could have said, I miss you. But instead I chose to say, Yrs. For ever, for I was. It was no less true than the other options, but I hate myself for picking it. I bet if I had said, I love you, or if I had said, I miss you, the letter would have made it in time. And if it had, then I am only a few days away from receiving his reply. But instead my letters torment me, forming a ring around my head of words, words that I know I wrote but can't remember when. There, to the left of my ear, are the words, warm in my friendships. There, to my right, stolen into my affections. And there, in the middle, Yrs. For ever. 

“Alexander,” he says.

I don't want to hear his voice. They say the voices of the dead will make you go mad. Cold in my professions sweeps past my eye.

He takes my hand, which is still propped up on the kitchen countertop, and his hands are warm. My eyes sting and I turn away from him. In silence he follows me from the kitchen back into the office. I can hear his feet falling against the floor, crunching over the last of the glass on the hardwood, and it's like he's actually here.

I don't sit at the desk. I stand, watching the letter on the floor, waiting for it to leap up and swallow me whole. To my dismay, he comes around to my front, and I see him. He looks at me with eyes that aren't quite dead and aren't quite alive, and that familiar smile is there, soft and sweet, like the honey gold of his hair. He bends down, graceful as ever, and takes the letter from the floor. I look away when his eyes skim over the words so he can't see my tears. I see reserved for the public and another for you out of the corner of my eye.

“Alexander.”

“It’s not you. I’m dreaming you, John.”

He looks at me, eyes wide, kind. Forgiving. Can you imagine? He takes my hand from where it sits on the desk and brings it to his lips. He is warm, and his lips are wet. My palm cradles his cheek: wet, too. His eyes are red. But forgiving.

“I’m here,” he says, and it’s his voice. John Laurens has blue eyes and a soft voice. He has always been taller than me and loves to tease me for it. His lips are soft and he always needs a shave. He is a man of God. But he is a man of men, as well. John Laurens is here. 

“No,” I say. “John Laurens is dead.”

He smiles, soft and beautiful. Like an angel. Like a soldier. We’re sitting around the fire again, toes warming, burning the wooden soles of our boots, but who cares? It’s war! There’s buttermilk at the bottom of a tin cup, and John Laurens is smiling. In another world, I would chastise him for reveling in victory. Now, I smile with him.

“I’m here. I’m here.”

_It was cold, where we were. A field in the middle of nothing in Pennsylvania. If you’d told me this was the Orient, or the Raj, I would have believed you. It was otherworldly compared to the life I had known as a child, or even the metropolis of New York City; it was a world so alien to all of us that we couldn’t help but fit ourselves in. The air itself, even, was resigned to its fate, just like us, just like us. The fields were cold, and wet in the afternoon, and shit-stained by nightfall if a soldier with dysentery stumbled across them. Here we were, in Hell. Retribution. Damnation. Punishment for our sins of the past._

_I didn’t know how to tell him I wished I could start over. I had just recovered from my illness; rode all the way from Morristown as soon as I could sit astride a horse, and I was weak. I am, and have always been, weak. In battle I would stand out, in writing I would stand out. But here — in the Hell I deserved for my sins — I was weak._

_There was something about the way he said my name that made me want to sin. Alexander, he said, long vowels and tired consonants, with the class and luxuriance of my very own Hephaestion, my Patroclus. He was not my weakness; he was not the tendon at the back of my ankle: no, John Laurens was Paris’ arrow. Alexander, he said, like he, too, was resigned to his own fate. Like he, too, knew what he was giving up._

_Alexander, he said, and were those tears in his eyes as he helped me from my horse or did I imagine them?_

_I was alive, no trace of fever. Weakened, but when have I not been weak? His books lay forgotten in the sand outside the Potts House, and he led my horse to the stables while I tried to regain my footing. Alexander, he said, on his return, and I had forgotten how tall he was, I had forgotten the heat of his cheek against mine and the strength of his arms, the scrape of his fingernails against the skin below my ear. We were soldiers, but we were men first. And to be men is to be tempted._

_He had a bed to himself, he whispered to me, in its own little room, in the darkness and cover of the night, when we can be tempted and not be seen. He said that if I was too weak, or if I could not bear it, for any reason, he would stop. But I didn’t let him stop me. Months and months the war had driven us apart, and there was time to be a soldier tomorrow, time to speak to the General and to Tench and the others. There would be time to gripe about a production of Cato and time to force drunkenness upon our bodies with far too little whiskey. But that time would begin at dawn._

_He gathered up the books at the foot of the steps and pulled the ratted tarp from underneath the doorjamb and tugged the frigid handle till the door squeaked open. The house was silent, cold, foreign — but ours, in the darkness that stole our identities and made us just humans. And Laurens was warm; his white hand on mine the candle leading the way through the darkness, up the stairs and down the hall, past the closed doors and chest of drawers that marked the furthest wall. I had never seen him like this, even in the dark, how he tipped me over the foot of the bed and pulled off my scarf and unbuttoned my coat and slid it from my shoulders. Everything was thought-through, every step had been premeditated. He knew what he was giving up. He knew what it meant to give into temptation, and he was not afraid. He was someone else when he said my name again, low and sweet and warm against my throat, and in my weakness I let him tip me back further till my head was against the pillow and his hips were between my legs and the blankets pooled around us and between us and over us. I was exhausted and numb from cold and weakened from the illness but still I did not let him stop._

_I had never met this Laurens, who was confident in his actions, who had learned from years of flirting and possibly years of taking things further than flirting, who knew what awaited him behind death’s door and stood on the threshold calculating and still decided sinning was worth the punishment._

_Alexander, he said._

_Fingers against brass buttons and trouser fastens and stocking garters. Leaning over to open the window to the moonlight so we could see the other. Stripping down to the barest basics of humanity, to our hair and our actions only. Our names didn’t matter, our stories didn’t matter, our braveries and battles didn’t matter. So young were we, so young and bright in moonlight, leaning our heads back and closing our eyes and opening our throats wide when we breathed so not to make a single sound._

_“I thought,” he said, but could not continue._

_“I know,” I answered, and gave him a second reason to stop talking._

_I fell asleep soon after he finished, too weak and tired out to tend to my own cares, and woke with the morning sun. It was then that I understood that I would never again meet the new Laurens who introduced himself to me the night before. He had gone, making the bed immaculately around my body, and left behind a second blanket. Just like him to think of my health first. And the truth came rushing in, so fast it blew the wind from my lungs, that Laurens was a more conflicted man than I would ever know. He was brave in battle by day, where God and his father could see him, and brave with me by night, when their eyes looked elsewhere. I understood then that every future time we fell into bed, it would be me to do the coaxing, to bring out in him what he wished had never been. I could not make him alright and I could not fix him, never mind convince him he was not broken, for these are not the things unbroken men do in the night._

_He returned to the house at dusk, after I had conferred with the general and the other aides. We met in the foyer without so much as a passing greeting._

_And still, when I returned to the room that night, although he was much less brazen with me and my body, he held me to him and we shared our warmth. One hand against my bare chest and the other holding my abdomen. His straight, Aquilaean nose laid against the meeting point of my ear and my hair. His lips hovering above my neck, whispering, ghosts of words, ghosts of promises, ghosts of love…_

The spring, he said, would turn to summer, and the cicadas would come out and the air would be warm. The war would be over before the summer’s end, he said, before the rains came to a close for fall. Where would we be? I asked. Here, he said, here and always here. If I have to step in front of a cannonball to come back here again, he said, I will. 

So when the war did not end and the battle wasn’t over, I suppose he returned himself to the Potts House once the summer came to a close. He stands in front of me like he did in that room, warm and graceful, a fraction of Heaven in our sector of Hell. And he smiles and says my name, and I feel the fire start to catch.


End file.
